


signs at sundown

by peonies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abuse, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Needles, Pre-Canon, Stitches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 02:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16864765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonies/pseuds/peonies
Summary: Dave finally lands a hit on his brother. He doesn't get the reaction he thought he would.





	signs at sundown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deserts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deserts/gifts).



> there is, uh, some victim-blame-y mentality on dave's part, because he's twelve and no one taught him better

The first and only time you draw blood on your brother is the week just after you turn twelve.

Houston is going through one of its seasonally-fucked menopausal goddamn hot flashes that week, high seventies and clear skies, and you are getting your block absolutely knocked off, as per usual, like completely and utterly Cobra Kai’d, except your Mr. Miyagi is also Johnny Lawrence, and also Mrs. LaRusso. You’re not really a karate kid, though – your bro is very hands-off, in basically every sense of the word, and, as far as you can tell, doesn’t really care for that abstratus, because the whopping one day of instruction you received on the ancient and venerable art of fistkind was essentially 1) tuck your thumb in and 2) what are you doing, go pick up your sword, dumbass.

It’s four in the afternoon and the winter sun is already crackling down near the horizon, and you’re tired and it’s hot, and you didn’t get to check the weather forecast beforehand, so you’re strifing in a long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants, boiling like an absolute chump. Clumps of sweat-damp hair fall into your eyes at every turn, shades slipping down your nose, and every clash of steel against steel makes your muscles creak, pulling at the tendon in your elbow that hasn’t quite shaped up since the time you stuck it out for the shittiest breakfall ever witnessed by human or beady fucking puppet eyes. Lil Cal’s not here, which is maybe the only reason you are not totally flailing around uncontrollably like one of those tube dudes in front of the local dealership and making a general embarrassment of yourself, but you suspect that has more to do with your bro planning to kick your ass Pringles® Original Flavor style than anything else. It’s not like its absence gives you an edge, anyway. He’s just less funny about the whole thing when Cal’s not bringing the party.

Swing and a miss and you’re wide open, flipping back instinctively. His katana slices through the air just under your toes, and you catch the edge of his blade on the flat of yours before he can slice your arm straight off your torso, just a split second before the treads of your sneakers meet the concrete and scrape backwards with the force of the blow. He lets you shove him away, leaping back gracefully, but his feet never touch down. It’s hard enough to see his directional tells without your hair getting all up in your peepers – you really need a haircut because holy _fuck_ this is annoying – and you only barely manage to move out of the way of his sword’s edge when he flashes in from behind you.

You also unwittingly position yourself right in front of his be-spatted size-eleven outstretched foot, the impact of which expels what feels like every single molecule of oxygen from your body through your mouth in a weird _TUH_ noise, and sends you skidding across the rooftop, all ass-over-teakettle-like.

When you’re done eating shit, you roll over to assess the damage. You’re pretty scuffed up, facially-speaking, but unfortunately not in a cosmetically punk way, and there’s a hole in the forearm of your right sleeve where you must have scraped down all the way to the skin during the emergency landing. It stings. Maybe just as much as the gap where his sword cut through your shirt and nicked your shoulder. That’s bleeding, but not too bad; it’s shallow enough that you won’t need stitches, which is great news, because the last thing you need when you’re lying awake at night in the cranked-up broiler that passes for your bedroom is an itch you can’t scratch. Central heating’s a bitch.

You’re pretty sure you re-fucked your elbow, too, which he’s not going to be happy about. And usually that would make the floor of your stomach fall out, like, who forgets to tuck and roll, it’s so fucking basic, kiddie shit, you could have turned this into a badass wakeup-shoryu. You are just dropping valuable invincibility frames all over the place like an old lady hailing down paleolithic Werthers upon a flock of unsuspecting grandkids. But, instead of vaguely nauseous and mad vertiginous, you just feel kinda pissed off. No weird lurching feeling today, no, sir, just a funny kind of burn, almost exactly like a spoonful of Tabasco® at the very back of your throat, dripping down into your chest.

Your bro is waiting for you to get back up, lips pinched in what foreshadows disapproval. He re-grips the katana, brings his right hand down on the hilt with a clack, then spins the sword in a fancy chiburi that you’d probably slice your fingers off trying to learn, and tucks it under his arm, as if to say he’s finished.

That tilts your sentiometer’s belligerence gauge from “Kinda-Sorta” all the way into “Super,” complete with a little infuriated _ding_ noise. Because, like, je- _gus_ , really? The guy normally just quits out into the apartment after he’s done cleaning shop, and that’s the cool guy thing to do, just vanish after giving Player 2 a good thrashing. Using a Personal Action to show off before the round closes, while objectively cool, is also a dick move, and if it’s meant to challenge you to keep composure, consider you well and truly fucking challenged. And it’s kinda unfair, right, because he would never let you get away with a diss even if you did manage to knock him down. He’d just take it as a next-level aggrievance, riposte with a bust-your-head-open-see-if-I-care cold shoulder. It’s asymmetrical as fuck, the scalene injustice of him not seeming to give a shit when you ignore him, the way you can’t seem to bring yourself to sling it back when it’s the other way around.

So you scowl and pick up your sword again, your skinned knuckles burning as you wrap your hands around the grip, and you fast draw on him, ’cause you’re pissed, and that initiates a new round. He leans back, calm as can be, deflects as he draws, ducks and flash steps while he turns, drifts back and slashes down from the upper right. You smash the katana away and lunge forward, feint high and strike low, years and years of muscle memory angling your limbs to cushion the force you receive and deal it back, struggling for tempo.

Your arms are burning but it doesn’t, well, _matter._ You are mad at this dude and his pointy shades that he somehow hasn’t needed to adjust once throughout this entire stupid strife-on-a-hot-tin-roof, at the way you still have to chase after him even though you’re legit keeping him on the defensive, how you are still making it so easy for him to weave out of your rushdown, that your flash step is always just a fraction of a second behind his. That when you find a frame-perfect opening, it’s not your voice in your head but his, clicking his tongue in frustration and saying _Follow through, Dave, for fuck’s sake._

You do, and he still gets a great reversal off of it, because you only notice him shifting his grip when it’s too late for you to react, and he parries your technically perfect blow so hard that your wrists turn to jello and the sword flies out of your hands, clattering to the ground. You go down hard again. Dammit. Back on the concrete, cheek-to-cheek with your old friend, always there to support you, ready to give you a big old pat on the back and a big old concussion on the brain. You refuse to open your eyes to see the edge of the katana he’s probably pointing at you to demonstrate how easy it would be for him to turn you into tweenage al pastor. You are ready to roast all by yourself, thank you very much, but first you need to marinate in your own indignity and ineffectual rage for at least two hours before you so much as look at a cooktop.

If he does that, then it must be over pretty fast, because all you hear is the click of the katana returning to his deck. You crack your eyes open, squinting against the sunlight to see your bro just standing there, looking at you, adjusting the velcro on his gloves, flexing his fingers experimentally. And there’s, uh. Something on his sleeve.

Oh shit oh fuck oh shit you are _so_ dead.

Congratulations! Looks like your follow-through did do something after all. The right sleeve of his polo is hanging open from where your sword cut through his upper arm. There is a not-insignificant amount of blood. He is for sure gonna kick your ass into the next calendar year, but you are frozen stiff, eyes glued to the line curving up from the base of his bicep to the back of his arm, outlining the trajectory of his turning parry.

“Dave.”

Mother _fuck_ that looks bad. It’s sliding down his arm. You think you might puke.

“Dave,” he says again, kind of impatient, and you remember, oh, right, this is the part where you’re supposed to get up, and you scramble to your feet, still unable to tear your eyes away from his arm.

There’s another beat, and then he sighs, a sharp exhale through his nose that you literally do not know how to interpret.

“Pick it up.”

You turn automatically and >/take sword, lips sealed shut. What is there to say? What can you possibly do to come back from this? You’re also trying to Punch-Out the part of you that is rattling on about giving him a taste of his own medicine, because the rest of you is just not up for making your next strife harder than it has to be.

By the time you menu out of your strife deck, he’s already halfway to the door. You hop down over the ledge, try not to catch up too quickly, biting back the flood of stupid questions knocking at the dam of your teeth. Right now, you follow him and keep your mouth shut.

He goes straight to the bathroom, ducking under one of his marionettes and through the open doorway, flicking the light on. He takes off his gloves and cap and tosses them onto the reservoir of the toilet. You stand there awkwardly, watching him scrub at his palms with the half-bar of Dial, rinsing the suds off under the tap. There’s a hell of a lot of red shit rolling down his elbow.

“Shirt off,” he says, shaking the water off of his hands. You stare at him and don’t move. That earns you a withering stare and a click of the teeth. “You gonna wrap your shit up or what?”

So you take your shirt off, feeling like a moron, and move into the bathroom proper as he yanks a towel off of the shower curtain rod, clamping it under his right arm. He opens the medicine cabinet with his left hand, takes out the bottle of peroxide, then a box of bandages.

The cut on your shoulder isn’t deep, just nasty-lookin’, so he has you run the shower over your top half to clean up, warning you not to fog up the mirror. The moment you’re done drying up, he clamps down on the cut with a handful of wadded-up toilet paper doused in, what, fire and fucking brimstone? Satan’s own demonic hell-slobber? You yelp and try to jerk away, but he just grabs your other arm, and you go very, very still because what if he gets his blood on you.

After he’s done wiping it down with peroxide, he tosses you the box of bandages and points to the toilet seat, taking the towel out from under his arm and padding his left hand with it, applying some pressure. You flip the lid down and sit obediently, peel off the paper backing of a butterfly bandage, and crane your neck over to look at your shoulder, pinching the edges of the cut together and pressing the bandage down over it. The edges of the cut hold together nicely, with minimal tension across the wings of the tape. You’ve had a lot of goddamn practice.

Your bro shucks his shirt, too, bends into the shower stall and detaches the showerhead to blast the blood off of his arm, angled so that the spray of Dave’s Big Fuckup goes down the drain like _Psycho_ instead of out into the bathroom like _Alien._ The fact that he hasn’t chewed you out yet makes you nervous. By this time, you’re usually getting a faceful of play-by-play strife autopsy peppered with _the hell is wrong with you_ and heavy, accusatory silences.

He doesn’t say anything, though, drying off his arm and shoulders with the bloody towel. The gash is bleeding only sluggishly now, and he just nods you off the toilet with a muttered _get dressed._

You abscond the fuck out of the bathroom and dash into your room, pull a shirt out of your closet and throw it on, a worn white tee you got when you were nine with a Texas-shaped screenprint of an orange-and-white Whataburger, because you thought the big macho posturing of this fast food chain was just hilarious enough to wear, like putting spurs and a ten-gallon hat on a baby or something. You kick off your shoes and change into shorts, too, because your sweats are sticking to your legs, and then you sit down on your bed and have a whole-ass mental shakedown.

After a couple of minutes, you manage to stop your insides from jittering so hard, and you rub your hands on your knees, taking a deep breath, holding it, letting it out slowly. Deflating like a balloon. You press the heels of your hands into your eyes.

Okay. What’s the play, here? Stay in your room for the rest of eternity and hope he forgets about the fact that you nearly relieved him of his arm? Not likely. Wait until he comes into the room to verbally tan your hide? No, thanks. You are not going to sit in this room cowering. You are not in a Hallmark movie. You are a Strider and you are going to own your shit. Except that you do not want to. You just want to curl up and go to sleep and make Future Dave deal with the inevitable shitstorm that Past Dave just dragged all of you into.

You should own up, but you don’t want to, because it’s not, technically, your fault, you’re not the one who initiates the strifes ninety-nine percent of the time, and why did he put a goddamn sword in your hands if this wasn’t the eventual goal? Were you just supposed to get your shit wrecked every day for the rest of eternity? What right does he have to get pissed off at you for doing exactly what he told you to do? That’s your best avenue of defense, probably. _Just following orders, sir, HQ told me to slice you up like a spiral-cut ham, and that’s exactly what I did, sir._

That’s exactly what you did. You cut him and you’re hiding in your room like you’re five years old, trying to hack a shield together that can withstand the onslaught of unflinching brotherly logic that guns straight for everything that’s still weak and childish about you – your laziness, your need to avoid responsibility, your inability to take anything on the chin. He might deserve this, but so do you, you guess, for fucking up so bad, and if you can’t stop screwing up, then you should at least have to look at what you did.

So, what the fuck, you get up and leave your shades on the bed, and pad back down the hall to the bathroom, heart threatening to break out of your chest and scramble under the bed.

The door is still open. He’s half-sitting on the sink, back facing the doorway, right arm twisted at a weird angle. There are three stitches in his arm already, black and pinched, and he’s pulling at the thread of a fourth with his teeth, keeping the knot secure with the scissors in his left hand. His shades have joined his cap and gloves.

“Come in or get out, Dave.”

That makes you full-body flinch. He snips off the tails of the knot, puts the scissors down on the sink, starts to re-thread the needle.

You come in and sit down on the toilet again, hands laced together, mouth dry, and stare at his back. You’ve seen all of this before – every cool dude has a couple of mysterious scars, and you’re brothers – but it’s never really occurred to you that they probably got stitched up at some point before they became the white lines that they are now. You kinda thought, at least subconsciously, that he was born a cool anime protagonist, and that this was, like… part of his character design, or something. God, _really?_

“Need help?” you blurt uselessly, and immediately regret it. Dude is sewing up his own arm like it’s no big deal, of course he doesn’t need help, what are you going to do, pick up the bits of thread and throw them in the trash?

He looks back at you, mostly impassive, a little tired, then back at the mirror, and you barely restrain yourself from planting your face into your palms.

Then he says, “Put on some beats.”

So you go to the living room and stare at the turntables. You don’t want to mix right now; you think he kinda wants you to sit in your fuckup, which is fair, but Christ alive you do not want to be an enclosed space with him. You thumb through a bunch of vinyls, grab a novelty Christmas album that you know is straight garbage, set the needle, let it spin.

And then you’re sitting on the toilet again, watching him wrap the thread around the lower blade of his scissors, muttering softly to himself. Strains of the human rights violation formerly known as “Jingle Bell Rock” filter into the room, and you watch his shoulders for a reaction, seeing if he freezes for a second in irritation or if he twitches in amusement. He’s not giving you anything, though, and you can see in the mirror that he just sets the needle in his skin, pushes the bloody edges of the wound together, slips it through with his thumb and index finger, gets it with his teeth and pulls the thread taut. He makes it look simple, painless.

It’s easy to look at the stitches, way easier than you thought it would be. You’re probably supposed to feel guilty, but you don’t. Don’t feel much of anything, except a morbid fascination with the mechanical precision of your bro’s sewing.

He must feel your eyes on him again, because he shoots you another look over his shoulder.

“You want something?”

Like, yeah, you do, you want an explanation for what is going to happen to you after he’s done surgerizing himself. A play-by-play of how you even tagged him in the first place. The deep lore on how he learned to stitch himself up like that, because it looks like he’s done it a hundred times before, and he does not have that many scars to show for it. You want to be sent a crisp and detailed _GameBro_ strategy guide in the mail on how to get to where he wants you to be, because you’re starting to get the idea that it’s not going to happen.

Instead, you say, “How’d you get that scar?”

He’s fiddling with the scissors. “How the fuck d’you think?”

You shrug, kinda stung, trying to play it cool. “Dunno. Thought there’d be a cool story or somethin’.”

“Nah,” he says around the needle in his mouth. “Strife’s a strife. Not much else to say on the matter.”

“Okay,” you say.

That makes him turn around, like all the way around, after he’s done cutting the tails on his fifth stitch, and you want to point out that he’s not done yet, it still looks really grisly, but you are all kinds of bad at marching to the beat of your own drum when he’s staring at you. So you fidget and meet his gaze out of the corner of your eye.

“You should learn to do these,” he says, and you whip your head around to squint at him, because surely he has totally lost it if he thinks you’re going to put your hands anywhere near this Grand Canyon of Bladekind Injuries. Yeah, okay, it’s not that big, probably not that bad if he’s not freaking, but you are absolutely not doing the whole needle song-and-dance right now, and definitely not on him.

“Uh.”

He jerks his head toward the sink. “C’mon.”

“I don’t—”

“Dave, will you just get over here,” and you guess you’re getting over there. He doesn’t put anything in your hands, though, just picks up the needle, shows you how to thread it, then talks you through what to do with your hands, about angles and loops, as he twists his shoulder to get at the back of his arm, and show you. You watch the needle go straight through both walls of sheared flesh, how he manipulates the thread and needle with his teeth and the scissors in his left hand, tying up a knot with precise, if logistically awkward, movements. It’s almost too familiar for you to handle. The entire thing is a fucking ordeal and you feel a little bit like he’s rubbing your nose in your mess, like, _look what you did, two left hands and no one home,_ but he’s also kind of just monotone and the same type of cranky he gets when he has to open up the Xbox to figure out which component failed this time.

He puts in one stitch, then two, calm and stonefaced, and the room is silent except for the faint arrhythmic chattering of someone putting “White Christmas” through the wood chipper.

Then he’s handing you the thread, pressing the scissor blades down on top of the third throw of the last stitch, saying, “Pull.”

And you do. The loop of thread disappears under the scissors, and he grunts in what could be loosely translated as acknowledgement. Snip-snip. Done. He takes the needle back. You let out a breath you didn’t even know you were holding.

It’s fucked up, right? This is mega fucked up. You feel like someone reversed all the inputs on your controller and your reactions to everything are the opposite of what they are supposed to be. You don’t feel bad about cutting your bro open, you don’t feel sick watching him suture his skin back together. You’re just scared that the other shoe is going to drop right on top of your head, and there’s nothing you can do about it except feel like you’re about to jump out of your skin. He’s holding it over your head and he has, like, a whole foot and a half on you. No way you’re getting your hands on that shoe, even if you had the help of rubbery green CGI goo and the blessing of the comedy archpriest himself, Robin Williams.

He’s putting stuff back in the medicine cabinet, sweeping fragments of crap off of the sink and into the trash, wiping down the stitches, taping a couple pieces of gauze over the whole fiasco, rinsing his hands again, wiping them on the towel. Then he stretches, and the lines of scar tissue stretch with him.

“C’mon.” He waits to turn off the light until you’re in the hallway, and he’s right behind you all the way into the living room. Your heart, previously interested exclusively in hiding under the bed forever, has decided to join the Slam Jam.

He grabs a tank top from the hamper of clean laundry next to the couch, careful not to disturb the gauze as he tugs it on over his head, then kind of just sits down in front of the TV, turns it on, and leans back, eyes closed. Uh, what the fuck, isn’t this the part where you get, like, shit on, and then you feel everything that rhymes with glad except the thing itself.

These guys are really going to town on “Silver Bells.” It is a straight up monster truck rally of sound in here.

“Hey,” you say, impulsive, mad-sad-bad. “What the fuck.”

He grunts. “What.”

You have this, like, horrifically embarrassing need to ask something stupid and needy, like _Are you mad at me?_ But, at the same time, your brain is just fried, and _What the fuck?_ seems like the only reasonable thing to say.

“You okay?” is what you say instead.

He looks at you like you’ve grown another head but he’s too tired to really invest in the reaction. “Fine.”

And then the next thing that comes out of your mouth, to your own horror and frustration, is “Sorry.”

“Dave,” he sighs, and it sounds so much like the shoe dropping that you kind of hunch in on yourself automatically, but he doesn’t look at you or get up from the couch or say anything else for a solid, like, minute.

Then, slowly, he gets up and walks to the kitchen, where Lil Cal is perched on top of the microwave. No fistbump, and you don’t know if that means you’re up the creek or not. Cal’s lips are zipped. Well, he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy, so not zipped. Just closed. Closed but somehow grinning at the same time. You don’t get what’s so funny about this.

What your bro does is fill two cups of water from the tap, and hand one to you, and then you’re just standing there with a cup of water, you have to take care of this cup of water now, it’s old and looks like it was stolen from a cafeteria, it’s up to you to take care of this fragile vessel of crystal-clear life juice until it’s ready to go home.

He leans on the counter, flicks a few shurikens out of the way, looks up at the kama hanging on the wall, clicks his tongue against his teeth again. “’S hot outside. Drink up.”

When was the last time he didn’t leave you to your own devices after a strife? You think it’s probably the time he sewed up your palm, muttering about how he should have known not to trust you with a live blade, and would you fucking hold still, Dave, for five seconds. That’s why you know those movements, the twist of thread around the blade of the scissors, the dip of the needle in and out of skin, the barbed-wire look of everything when it’s all tied up.

Your bro takes your cup and fills it back up when you’re done drinking. You feel grateful and then mad at yourself for feeling grateful. And so on.

“It was a solid commit,” he says, rolling his glass in his hand. “Your approach still needs work. But it was solid.”

Mother of god. He’s not pissed, he’s proud, and that’s somehow… worse? Like, he’s pumped that you shucked his arm like a goddamn oyster? Is that why he’s not blowing his top? You stare down at the cup in your hands. It’s like, this is your prize for stabbing your own brother. _Good job, Dave, you’re a real man now, really got me good, next time go right for the center of mass, okay, kid? Wanna learn how to patch up a sucking chest wound?_

You really do not know what to think right now.

“Dave?”

“Yeah.”

“You good?”

Nah. “Perfect.”

“You gonna look me in the eye, kid?”

With great reluctance, you look up at him, meet his eyes with your own, and the calm certitude there just knocks the fight out of you.

“Okay.” He tugs down the collar of his tank, taps the shine of a scar that runs up across the left side of his chest with his index finger. “This one’s from a car crash, actually.”

Your eyebrows go up in spite of yourself. He shrugs, releases the band of the tank top, drains the glass and sets it down in the sink on top of some nicked-up kunai. Then, in the open, where you can see it coming, he reaches out and scuffs his knuckles across the top of your head, mussing up your gross, half-damp hair, and leaves you in the kitchen. You wait until you hear the creak of the couch before turning to stare at him, at the back of his head, silhouetted in the flashing glow of the TV.

How the hell are you supposed to do this all over again tomorrow? You link the tips of your fingers behind your neck, feeling like a kid lost in the Mall of America, watching the rollercoasters zoom by, surrounded by people you don’t recognize, all of them carrying big plastic shopping bags of trinkety shit, and you’re just trying to find the customer service desk so you can ask for your brother back on the PA. All you get is the sight of his hair sticking up where it’s pressed against the back of the couch, and the empty plastic cup in your hand, and gratitude that you don’t want, pride that makes your stomach cramp.

You still want to sit next to him, though. Be his kid brother. You cut him up and he’s proud of you, for once in your life. You guess you love him because you’re so freaked out that his arm’s going to get infected and he’s going to walk you through an amputation next. Because he’s cool enough to know how to do that kind of Bear Grylls shit, you think, and you want to be put-together, to not feel like you’re coming apart at the seams. You want to feel like you’re keeping up. You want another glass of water.

When you go up to the couch, his arms are folded across his stomach, and his eyes are closed, although you can’t tell if he’s really sleeping. You can see the edge of the scar wrapping up to the ridge of his left collarbone. His chest rises and falls with each breath, regular, deep. You try to picture the car crash in your head, place it on his scattered, vague timeline.

The glow of the TV lulls you to sleep as you pick absentmindedly at the edge of the bandage on your shoulder.

**Author's Note:**

> me, diverting myself from finishing the blade runner thing: I can't wait to write jokes again  
> also me: what if we made jokes but they weren't funny, and also if we made strifes into street fighter


End file.
